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August 2014

Day in the Life of a Revenue Assurance Analyst

Day in the Life of a Revenue Assurance Analyst

Revenue assurance lives somewhere in the city meadowlands that separate Billing/Operations Borough from Internal Audit Village.

Being a staff function, RA has little official power on its own, but if RA is put behind energetic, smart, and influential people, it can deliver great value to the telco organization.

My quest to better understand the human dimension of RA led me to Michael Lazarou, an RA analyst at a small GSM operator in Europe.  Reading a couple of his excellent blog posts on talkRA, I contacted him, we met on Skype, and his keen observations on the RA function follow.

Dan Baker: Michael, to start, I’m curious how the RA function at your company is organized?

Michael Lazarou: Happy to, Dan.  My firm is a subsidiary of a larger telecom group with more than a dozen operators worldwide.

The group is involved in our local RA operation in a big way, setting the agenda for our RA activities.  We actually have a contract with an outsource firm who runs activities for us.

Locally we collect and organize the data and push it to the outsourcer.  Then they do exception analysis to a certain point and that’s where we pick up the results, analyze them, and then follow up with different departments.

Because we have a new convergent billing/charging system, we’re doing a lot of rating performance checks these days.  Both prepaid and postpaid are rated in real-time.  We are also busy reconciling the network elements with the rating platform.

In one of your blog posts on talkRA, you talked about the challenge of interacting with the other departments — and trying to win their support for RA programs.

Yes, that is the biggest challenge for revenue assurance because other departments see RA as someone trying to get them into trouble -- or create more work for them than necessary.  Not everyone realizes we’re there to help the company.  We spend a lot of time asking for information and data.  And if you don‘t get back to them and show the results of your work, they won’t respect you.  Many consider us internal auditors.  Not everyone gets what we’re about.  And I think is due to a lack of awareness and the fact that our organization is at a lower level of maturity.

Actually, very few primary controls are in place: that is one of the key issues.  Revenue assurance lacks a view of everything going on.  Sometimes RA brings up important issues that may be known but no one does anything about.

Getting reliable data and convincing people to cooperate remains a key problem.  It also takes a long time to get our hands on data to work with.

So, how would like to improve the operation?  What would you do to make it better?

Perhaps the most important thing is educating the organization about revenue assurance.  The business is not just about launching new products and service.  It also needs to ensure that the product and service is of a good quality and there are no leakages or other operational issues.

We also need executives to take a more active interest in RA to push it along with more controls.

I think in many ways revenue assurance is still taking its first baby steps.  One time I sat in a room with RA leaders from several large operators.  They were having a round-robin discussion about moving their RA programs forward, and the subject of RA for enterprise customers came up.  Well, the general consensus there was that while RA programs were mature on the consumer side, at enterprise accounts, it was a relative greenfield.

That is interesting because we are having a similar discussion about corporate customers just now.  Our enterprise customers have many services, many mobile phones, PBX systems, so there’s potential for leakage because their provisioning is more complicated.

I see revenue assurance as a sort of continuous improvement function.  It exists to help the company tighten its processes and also serves to bring departments together because RA has a 360 degree view of what marketing is doing, what the business is doing, what’s happening in roaming and the recording of the books in finance.

You have a bird’s eye view of the company and that’s a privileged position because the information that comes out of RA can be used to make decisions at both a higher executive and operational level.

Unfortunately, organizations have a tendency to only think of RA after the fact.  There’s pressure to launch a new product or a new service, but only afterwards will people think about leakages and fraud.  So the biggest obstacle I guess is human nature and the rush to compete and gets things out to market.

How successful are you if a new product is getting launched to be in there with them and helping them plan and build up controls?

We usually get to do a quick review of products before they launch, but that’s as far as we can go because we lack the people to take part in the planning from the very beginning.  We talk to billing or the related IT departments to get all the information we need to modify our own scripts and activities, but that is as far as we actually can go.

A while back I had a discussion with Ed Shanahan, former head of the revenue assurance practice at TMNG (now Cartesian).  Well, he remarked that at a theoretical level RA’s responsibilities are vast and you never have enough staff to get the job done.  And yet if RA aligns itself with the services and the things that the company wants to be excellent in today, the program can go very far.

That advice applies very well to our situation I think.  There are certain things that are going on in a company at any given time.  So, if RA is aligned with those and can provide some assistance in the five top on-going activities, such as roaming, interconnect traffic, and a few other things, it can make a big difference.

And yet, the reality of a small operator is that our resources are thin and we are being pushed in a few different directions, so we may not have the time to put in the controls we know we need.

Thanks for your great perspective, Michael.

Copyright 2014 Black Swan Telecom Journal

 

Michael Lazarou

Michael Lazarou has worked as a Revenue Assurance Analyst since 2011.  His previous work was in programming and his studies included a double major in Computer Science and Economics, as well as an MBA.

Black Swan Solution Guides & Papers

cSwans of a Feather

  • The Revenue Assurance Game: How the Rules Change in the Era of IoT & Mobile Broadband interview with Rene Felber & Gadi Solotorevsky — Revenue assurance is perhaps the hardest of telecom functions to define because the term is used in so many different senses.  This discussion on the evolving role of revenue assurance was catalyzed by a survey of experts in the profession.
  • Day in the Life of a Revenue Assurance Analyst interview with Michael Lazarou — Revenue assurance is much more than a software category.  It’s individual analysts struggling to help their larger organizations get a handle on system errors and coordination problems.  In this interview, an analyst reveals the many challenges of getting the revenue assurance job done at a small GSM operator in Europe.
  • Revenue Assurance: History and New Beginnings in RA Maturity interview with Daniela Giacomantonio & Gadi Solotorevsky — The Roman Forum was the center of commercial life in ancient Rome.  Now, two millennia later, the Forum lives on in the exchange of ideas across countless professions and  media.  In this interview, two Revenue Assurance experts discuss both the new RA Maturity initiative of the TM Forum and the value of telco/solution vendor collaboration.
  • Versatile, Portable & Corrections-Savvy: Quest for the Swiss Army Knife of Revenue Assurance Software by Mark Yelland — Revenue assurance maturity models are not cast in stone.  Since  best practices will change over time, it’s healthy to explore moving maturity models forward.  For example, great gains have been made in leakage detection, but RA corrections has been harder to master.  The author dreams about seven functions that should ideally come together in a single all-purpose revenue assurance software tool.
  • Revenue Assurance Maturity: Report From the Arena interview with Eric Nelson — Revenue assurance maturity can‘t be easily computed.  How do you  compare the KPIs of Comcast billing with that of mobile money RA in Western Africa?  Even still, this article offers some universal RA wisdom from a straight-shooting veteran of carriers large and small.  Topics discussed include: dashboard or process, COTS vs. inhouse solutions, and tips on gaining internal support for the RA practice.

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